2003-01-26 04:00:00 PDT Los Angeles -- David Mills sits on the floor of his trailer on the NBC production lot watching the fourth episode of "Kingpin," the new series he's created about Mexican drug lords. The rough-cut videotape shows Maria Conchita Alonso enthusiastically kicking her legs as she shares an intimate moment with a cartel member. A few scenes later, a prostitute kills a kinky London heroin dealer after he stubs out a cigarette in her mouth. The "kingpin," in turn, orders her execution. He already has blood on his hands, having arranged the murder of a hotheaded rival who'd dismembered a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and fed his arm to a pet tiger.

"Every step of the way -- outline, first draft, pilot -- where you might think the network would chicken out or try to water it down, they've just got more and more excited," Mills said.

In fact, NBC is so bullish, the network will broadcast six "Kingpin" episodes twice a week on Sundays and Tuesdays during February sweeps, hoping audiences will learn to love a neurotic crime family not based in New Jersey.

The man who would be kingpin is Miguel Cadena (Yancey Arias), a Stanford- educated drug dealer. His wife, Marlene (Sheryl Lee of "Twin Peaks" fame), is a cocaine-sniffing lawyer inspired equally by Lady Macbeth and Hilary Clinton. Brother Chato (Bobby Cannavale of "Third Watch"), as Mills puts it, "likes to kill, likes to (have sex), likes to drink. He likes the simple things in life. " There's also a sleazy plastic surgeon and a corrupt cop, along with assorted hookers and henchmen.

"Who is the audience rooting for?" Mills muses. "Is the audience rooting for Miguel to be a more profitable drug dealer? No. I think they'll be rooting for him to maintain his humane impulses, even though the choices he makes to have people murdered are going to erode that side of him."

Mills says one of the dramatic hooks that impels "Kingpin" can be found in the central character's sheer magnitude of denial. "Miguel is like the CEO of a tobacco company; he does wicked deeds but desperately does not think of himself as a wicked man. If he's evil, how can he tuck his 8-year-old son in bed at night? He's psychologically invested in this lack of self-awareness, but the universe is going to remind him time and time again of what he truly is. It's the duality that makes Miguel interesting. This college-educated man has every opportunity to use his intellect and entrepreneurial instincts to make a legitimate success. Instead, he's taken these gifts God gave him and, for reasons that we will slowly reveal over time, he's put himself in the service of the multibillion-dollar family business. 'Kingpin' is about the slow death of his soul."

A former Washington Post reporter, Mills broke into television when his former college classmate David Simon hired him to write for "Homicide" in 1993.

Mills later worked as a writer-producer for "ER" and "NYPD Blue."

Two years ago, after earning Emmy awards for co-writing and co-producing "The Corner," Mills heard that NBC's then-president, Andrew Lack, had seen the movie "Traffic" and wanted to develop a drug-themed series in the same vein.

"People said, 'Oh, you mean a DEA agent who tracks down a drug lord,' " Mills recounts. But Lack wanted the story to focus on the drug lord, not an agent.

"I thought, damn, that makes perfect sense," Mills said. "So I did a little Internet research on the cartels in Mexico and realized that's where the kingpins are. No drug dealer in the United States is generating billions of dollars in

revenue, but they are just south of the border. So I pitched this story about a Mexican kingpin with an American-born wife, and they said, 'All right. Let's do it.' "

Once he got the green light, Mill hired a largely Latino writing staff and boned up on his Shakespeare. "I literally bought the 'Cliff Notes' to 'Macbeth, ' " explains Mills, who did not travel to Mexico to research the milieu. " 'Kingpin' is not so much about how drugs are trafficked. It's more about palace intrigue, with these characters as medieval princes and warring clans. The drugs ground the show in reality, but the story could just as well be set in the Roman Empire, where the scale of the wealth and power is large, and the stakes are high."

This particular empire, however, is bereft of conventional heroes. With so few Latino American actors getting leading roles, Mills acknowledges that "some people ask if the Hispanic community is going to be up in arms because the 'Kingpin' characters are bad role models or whatever. I think that's backward, in a way.

"For 'The Corner,' HBO expected black people to attack it: Of all the subjects to write about, you had to do a six-hour show about the lowest aspect of black American life, heroin addicts, thieves? But we tried to represent the humanity of the situation, and black people loved seeing black actors, who rarely get to play parts where you get that deep into the mess of the human experience.

"I wrote an 'NYPD Blue' episode where Lt. Fancy and his wife (who are black) are pulled over in Queens and humiliated by this white cop. It was about Fancy being in a position of power to get revenge on this poor sap and enjoying it. James McDaniel (who played Fancy) loved it. " 'Kingpin' is a show about the condition of a man's soul. About Miguel Cadena's soul, and the fact that he is Mexican is irrelevant. You look around at the rest of the landscape on TV, and Hollywood seems to think you need a Michael Douglas (as in 'Traffic'), a white guy, to make a story universal. I rail against that."

Mills and the network had trouble finding the right actor to play "Kingpin's" conflicted title character after it was decided that their initial favorite, Mexican TV star Jorge Salinas, lacked sufficient command of English. Arias, a New York-trained stage actor and singer, was so far off the radar in Hollywood that he got called in only because another actor recommended him for the role.

"When Yancey walked out of the room after his audition, the network people were saying, 'He's Al Pacino in "The Godfather," he's a young Benjamin Bratt.' He had to be credible as the boss, but Yancey plays the tortured aspect very well, too. You can't take your eyes off him. As a character, he's at his best when he's playing it close to his vest, outsmarting the other guy."

The most colorful villain Miguel outsmarts in "Kingpin's" premiere episode is scene-stealing El Huevudo (Jacob Vargas), a bantam-weight braggart in a huge cowboy hat given to brandishing a bullwhip and decapitating his enemies.

"NBC's one note was, 'Don't kill that guy,' " Mills said. "In the writing room, we started to look at El Huevudo and these other characters like this gallery of Batman villains -- they're a half a step larger than life -- to really contrast with Miguel's CEO approach. My biggest argument to (NBC Entertainment President) Jeff Zucker was: 'I'll give you other people who are just as outrageous as El Huevudo. Trust me. There's more where he came from.' "